Michael Danquah

What does politics look like in sub-Saharan Africa? How does it work and whom does it benefit?

Development Economist and Senior Lecturer at the University of Ghana, Michael Danquah, explains the power plays in place to keep only a privileged few in rule of his country, while the rest of the population faces a stagnant economy that puts education, health, and public policies at risk.
Improving education, raising awareness and restructuring old and faulty concepts of power become keys to leading a country out of the darkness, and to help start to position them, little by little, on the path to economic, democratic and social development.

We spoke with Dr. in Geneva during the conference: Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilisation, organized by The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).

The title of his presentation was:
Inequality and Institutions: Exploring the Mediating Role of Political Settlements in Some Selected African Countries

“In this paper, we quantitatively examine the interplay of legal, political and economic institutions and political settlements on income inequality. We focus on the marginal effect of the institutional variables on income inequality conditioned on political settlements. The findings show that the marginal effect of legal, political and economic institutions contingent on competitive clientelist political settlements exacerbates income inequality significantly. This means that politics and power play in competitive clientelist political settlements are detrimental to equality and poverty reduction.”